Ode to The AmoebaRecall from Time's abysmal chasmThat piece of primal protoplasmThe First Amoeba, strangely splendid,From whom we're all of us descended.That First Amoeba, weirdly clever,Exists today and shall forever,Because he reproduced by fission;He split himself, and each divisionAnd subdivision deemed it fittingTo keep on splitting, splitting, splitting;So, whatsoe'er their billions be,All, all amoebas still are he.Zoologists discern his featuresIn every sort of breathing creatures,Since all of every living species,No matter how their breed increasesOr how their ranks have been recruited,From him alone were evoluted.King Solomon, the Queen of ShebaAnd Hoover sprang from that amoeba;Columbus, Shakespeare, Darwin, ShelleyDerived from that same bit of jelly.So famed is he and well-connected,His statue ought to be erected,For you and I and William BeebeAre undeniably amoebae!

At last the mighty task is done;Resplendent in the western sunThe Bridge looms mountain high;Its titan piers grip ocean floor,Its great steel arms link shore with shore,Its towers pierce the sky.

On its broad decks in rightful pride,The world in swift parade shall ride,Throughout all time to be;Beneath, fleet ships from every port,Vast landlocked bay, historic fort,And dwarfing all the sea.

To north, the Redwood Empires gates;To south, a happy playground waits,In Rapturous appeal;Here nature, free since time began,Yields to the restless moods of man,Accepts his bonds of steel.

Launched midst a thousand hopes and fears,Damned by a thousand hostile sneers,Yet Neer its course was stayed,But ask of those who met the foeWho stood alone when faith was low,Ask them the price they paid.

Ask of the steel, each strut and wire,Ask of the searching, purging fire,That marked their natal hour;Ask of the mind, the hand, the heart,Ask of each single, stalwart part,What gave it force and power.

'Of Miscellany Poems To my Honor’d Friend Dr. Charleton On his Learned and Useful Works; But more particularly his Treatise of Stone-Heng, By him restored to the true Founders', collected in Poetical Miscellanies: The Fifth Part (1704), 39. (Dr Walter Charleton was physician in ordinary to King Charles I. His treatise on Stonehenge was published in 1663.)

'Letter to B——— ———', in Southern Literary Messenger (Jul 1836). Quoted in Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1917), 169, and Appendix, 311. According to different commentators, B——— may be merely a fictional character, or Bulwer-Lyton, or the publisher Elam Bliss.

A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable. He lives with data that cannot be numbered, and his experiments can be done only once. The information in a poem is, by definition, not reproducible. ... He becomes an equivalent of scientist, in the act of examining and sorting the things popping in [to his head], finding the marks of remote similarity, points of distant relationship, tiny irregularities that indicate that this one is really the same as that one over there only more important. Gauging the fit, he can meticulously place pieces of the universe together, in geometric configurations that are as beautiful and balanced as crystals.

Poem (1904) answering the question: How old are fleas?. 'On the Antiquity of Microbes', Strickland W. Gillilan. For some years it was considered the shortest poem until 'Lines on the Questionable Importance of the Individual': “I … Why?” appeared from Anon. (As quoted in S.N. Behrman, The New Yorker (27 May 1972), 38-81. In The Lyceum News (1911), 2, No. 1, 15, it is noted that 14-year-old Charles E. Varney, Jr. recited the poem in his English class, but the teacher said the assignment had specified a poem to be complete in at least four lines long. So he continued: “Well’m / I'll add ’em / So had / Madam.”

And from my pillow, looking forth by lightOf moon or favouring stars, I could beholdThe antechapel where the statue stoodOf Newton with his prism and silent face,The marble index of a mind for everVoyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

And indeed I am not humming,Thus to sing of Cl-ke and C-ming,Who all the universe surpassesin cutting up and making gases;With anatomy and chemics,Metaphysics and polemics,Analyzing and chirugery,And scientific surgery …H-slow's lectures on the cabbageUseful are as roots of Babbage;Fluxions and beet-root botany,Some would call pure monotony.

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,The Element of fire is quite put out;The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans witCan well direct him where to look for it.And freely men confesse that this world’s spent,When in the Planets, and the FirmamentThey seeke so many new; and then see that thisIs crumbled out againe to his Atomies.’Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;All just supply, and all Relation;Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,For every man alone thinkes he hath gotTo be a phoenix, and that then can beeNone of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.

At quite uncertain times and places,The atoms left their heavenly path,And by fortuitous embraces,Engendered all that being hath.And though they seem to cling together,And form 'associations' here,Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether,And through the depths of space career.

By death the moon was gathered in Long ago, ah long ago;Yet still the silver corpse must spinAnd with another's light must glow.Her frozen mountains must forgetTheir primal hot volcanic breath,Doomed to revolve for ages yet,Void amphitheatres of death.And all about the cosmic sky,The black that lies beyond our blue,Dead stars innumerable lie, And stars of red and angry hueNot dead but doomed to die.

By firm immutable immortal laws Impress’d on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strifeOrganic forms, and kindled into life;How Love and Sympathy with potent charmWarm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,And bind Society in golden chains.

Could Hamlet have been written by a committee, or the “Mona Lisa” painted by a club? Could the New Testament have been composed as a conference report? Creative ideas do not spring from groups. They spring from individuals. The divine spark leaps from the finger of God to the finger of Adam, whether it takes ultimate shape in a law of physics or a law of the land, a poem or a policy, a sonata or a mechanical computer.

Do not all charms flyAt the mere touch of cold philosophy?There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:We know her woof, her texture; she is givenIn the dull catalogue of common things.Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mineUnweave a rainbow.

Evolution: At the Mind's CinemaI turn the handle and the story starts:Reel after reel is all astronomy,Till life, enkindled in a niche of sky,Leaps on the stage to play a million parts.Life leaves the slime and through all ocean darts;She conquers earth, and raises wings to fly;Then spirit blooms, and learns how not to die,-Nesting beyond the grave in others' hearts.I turn the handle: other men like meHave made the film: and now I sit and lookIn quiet, privileged like DivinityTo read the roaring world as in a book.If this thy past, where shall they future climb,O Spirit, built of Elements and Time?

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet, but always his encouragement and support … The sailor and traveller, the anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist, phrenologist, spiritualist, mathematician, historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.

Force, then, is Force, but mark you! Not a thing,Only a Vector;Thy barbèd arrows now have lost their sting,Impotent spectre!Thy reign, O force! is over. Now no moreHeed we thine action;Repulsion leaves us where we were before,So does attraction.Both Action and Reaction now are gone.Just ere they vanished,Stress joined their hands in peace, and made them one;Then they were banished....

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.And the great fleas themselves, in turn have, greater fleas to go on;While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on. [He was imitating: 'So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite 'em; And so proceed ad infinitum.' Poetry, a Rhapsody, by Jonathan Swift.]

I abide in a goodly Museum,Frequented by sages profound:'Tis a kind of strange mausoleum,Where the beasts that have vanished abound.There's a bird of the ages Triassic, With his antediluvian beak,And many a reptile Jurassic, And many a monster antique.

I like relativity and quantum theoriesbecause I don't understand themand they make me feel as if space shifted aboutlike a swan thatcan't settle,refusing to sit still and be measured;and as if the atom were an impulsive thingalways changing its mind.

I must confess the language of symbols is to meA Babylonish dialectWhich learned chemists much affect;It is a party-coloured dressOf patch'd and piebald languages:'T is English cut on Greek and Latin,Like fustian heretofore on satin.

I think that I shall never seeA poem as lovely as a tree.A tree whose hungry mouth is prestAgainst the earth’s sweet flowing breast;A tree that looks at God all day,And lifts her leafy arms to pray;A tree that may in Summer wearA nest of robins in her hair;Upon whose bosom snow has lain;Who intimately lives with rain.Poems are made by fools like me,But only God can make a tree.

If the radiance of a thousand sunsWere to burst at once into the skyThat would be like the splendour of the Mighty One...I am become Death,The shatterer of worlds.[Quoted after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]

IODINEIt was Courtois discover'd Iodine(In the commencement of this century),Which, with its sisters, bromine and chlorine,Enjoys a common parentage - the sea;Although sometimes 'tis found, with other things,In minerals and many saline springs.

But yet the quantity is so minuteIn the great ocean, that a chemist might,With sensibilities the most acute,Have never brought this element to light,Had he not thought it were as well to tryWhere ocean's treasures concentrated lie.

And Courtois found that several plants marine,Sponges, et cetera, exercise the artOf drawing from the sea its iodineIn quantities sufficient to impartIts properties; and he devised a planOf bringing it before us - clever man!

It is probably no exaggeration to suppose that in order to improve such an organ as the eye at all, it must be improved in ten different ways at once. And the improbability of any complex organ being produced and brought to perfection in any such way is an improbability of the same kind and degree as that of producing a poem or a mathematical demonstration by throwing letters at random on a table.[Expressing his reservations about Darwin's proposed evolution of the eye by natural selection.]

Opening address to the Belfast Natural History Society, as given in the 'Belfast Northern Whig,' (19 Nov 1866). As cited by Charles Darwin in The Variation of Animals & Plants Under Domestication (1868), 222.

My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?

My final word, before I'm done,Is “Cancer can be rather fun”—Provided one confronts the tumourwith a sufficient sense of humour.I know that cancer often kills,But so do cars and sleeping pills;And it can hurt till one sweats,So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.A spot of laughter, I am sure,Often accelerates one's cure;So let us patients do our bitTo help the surgeons make us fit.

My soul is an entangled knot,Upon a liquid vortex wroughtBy Intellect in the Unseen residing,And thine doth like a convict sit,With marline-spike untwisting it,Only to find its knottiness abiding;Since all the tools for its untyingIn four-dimensional space are lying,Wherein they fancy interspersesLong avenues of universes,While Klein and Clifford fill the voidWith one finite, unbounded homoloid,And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed. (1878)

Never fear big long words.Big long words name little things.All big things have little names.Such as life and death, peace and war.Or dawn, day, night, hope, love, home.Learn to use little words in a big way.It is hard to do,But they say what you mean.When you don't know what you mean, use big words.That often fools little people.

Nor ever yetThe melting rainbow's vernal-tinctur'd huesTo me have shone so pleasing, as when firstthe hand of science pointed out the pathIn which the sun-beams gleaming from the westFall on the watery cloud.

Not greatly moved with awe am ITo learn that we may spyFive thousand firmaments beyond our own.The best that's knownOf the heavenly bodies does them credit small.View'd close, the Moon's fair ballIs of ill objects worst,A corpse in Night's highway, naked, fire-scarr'd, accurst;And now they tellThat the Sun is plainly seen to boil and burstToo horribly for hell.So, judging from these two,As we must do,The Universe, outside our living Earth,Was all conceiv'd in the Creator's mirth,Forecasting at the time Man's spirit deep,To make dirt cheap.Put by the Telescope!Better without it man may see,Stretch'd awful in the hush'd midnight,The ghost of his eternity.

Oh, most magnificent and noble Nature!Have I not worshipped thee with such a loveAs never mortal man before displayed?Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation,And searched into thy hidden and mysterious waysAs Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage?

One might talk about the sanity of the atomthe sanity of spacethe sanity of the electronthe sanity of water—For it is all aliveand has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves.The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.

ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless wavesWas born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;First, forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;These, as successive generations bloom,New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood;The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,Of language, reason, and reflection proud,With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod,And styles himself the image of his God;Arose from rudiments of form and sense,An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

Poore soule, in this thy flesh what do'st thou know?Thou know'st thy selfe so little, as thou know'st not.How thou did'st die, nor how thou wast begot.Thou neither know'st how thou at first camest in,Nor how thou took'st the poyson of mans sin.Nor dost thou, (though thou know'st, that thou art so)By what way thou art made immortall, know.Thou art too narrow, wretch, to comprehendEven thy selfe; yea though thou wouldst but bendTo know thy body. Have not all soules thoughtFor many ages, that our body'is wroughtOf Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements?And now they thinke of new ingredients,And one soule thinkes one, and another wayAnother thinkes, and 'tis an even lay. Knowst thou but how the stone doth enter inThe bladder's Cave, and never breake the skin?Knowst thou how blood, which to the hart doth flow,Doth from one ventricle to th'other go? And for the putrid stuffe, which thou dost spit,Knowst thou how thy lungs have attracted it?There are no passages, so that there is(For aught thou knowst) piercing of substances.And of those many opinions which men raiseOf Nailes and Haires, dost thou know which to praise?What hope have we to know our selves, when weeKnow not the least things, which for our use bee?

So erst the Sage [Pythagoras] with scientific truthIn Grecian temples taught the attentive youth;With ceaseless change how restless atoms passFrom life to life, a transmigrating mass;How the same organs, which to-day composeThe poisonous henbane, or the fragrant rose,May with to-morrow's sun new forms compile,Frown in the Hero, in the Beauty smile.Whence drew the enlighten'd Sage the moral plan,That man should ever be the friend of man;Should eye with tenderness all living forms,His brother-emmets, and his sister-worms.

From 'Botanic Garden' (1781), part 1, canto 1, lines 289-92. The Botanic Garden, with Philosophical Notes (4th Ed., 1799). At the time Erasmus Darwin penned his poem, he would have been aware of a limited history of steam power: Edward Someset, 2nd Marquis of Worcester steam pump (1663), Thomas Savery's steam pump (1698), Thomas Newcomen atmospheric engine (1712), Matthew Boulton and James Watt first commercial steam engine (1776). Watt did not build his first 'double acting' engine, which enabled using a flywheel, until 1783 (two years after Darwin's poem). It was also after Darwin's poem was written that the first steamboat, using paddles, the Pyroscaphe steamed up a French river on 15 Jul 1783. Darwin's predicted future for the steam engine car did not come to pass until Richard Trevithick tested his Camborne road engine (1801). The Wrights' first airplane flight came a century later, in 1903.

That small word “Force,” they make a barber's block,Ready to put onMeanings most strange and various, fit to shockPupils of Newton....The phrases of last century in thisLinger to play tricks—Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:—Those long-nebbed words that to our text books stillCling by their titles,And from them creep, as entozoa will,Into our vitals.But see! Tait writes in lucid symbols clearOne small equation;And Force becomes of Energy a mereSpace-variation.

'Report on Tait's Lecture on Force:— B.A., 1876', reproduced in Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (2001), 19. Maxwell's verse was inspired by a paper delivered at the British Association (B.A.. He was satirizing a “considerable cofusion of nomenclature” at the time, and supported his friend Tait's desire to establish a redefinition of energy on a thermnodynamic basis.

The farthest Thunder that I heardWas nearer than the SkyAnd rumbles still, though torrid NoonsHave lain their missiles by-The Lightning that preceded itStruck no one but myself-But I would not exchange the BoltFor all the rest of Life-Indebtedness to OxygenThe Happy may repay,But not the obligationTo Electricity-It founds the Homes and decks the DaysAnd every clamor brightIs but the gleam concomitantOf that waylaying Light-The Thought is quiet as a Flake-A Crash without a Sound,How Life’s reverberationIs Explanation found-—

The history of the cosmosis the history of the struggle of becoming.When the dim flux of unformed lifestruggled, convulsed back and forth upon itself,and broke at last into light and darkcame into existence as light,came into existence as cold shadowthen every atom of the cosmos trembled with delight.

The longest tyranny that ever sway’dWas that wherein our ancestors betray’dTheir free-born reason to the Stagirite [Aristotle],And made his torch their universal light.So truth, while only one suppli'd the state,Grew scarce, and dear, and yet sophisticate.

The Reproductions of the living EnsFrom sires to sons, unknown to sex, commence...Unknown to sex the pregnant oyster swells,And coral-insects build their radiate shells...Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,And fathers live transmitted in their sons;Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,The same their manners, and the same their minds.

This day relenting GodHath placed within my handA wondrous thing; and GodBe praised. At His command,Seeking His secret deedsWith tears and toiling breath,I find thy cunning seeds,O million-murdering Death.I know this little thingA myriad men will save.O Death, where is thy sting?Thy victory, O Grave?Poem he wrote following the discovery that the malaria parasite was carried by the amopheline mosquito.

From a privately printed book of verse, anonymously published, by R.R., In Exile (1906). As cited by S. Weir Mitchell, in 'The Literary Side of a Physician’s Life—Ronald Ross as a Poet', Journal of the American Medical Association (7 Sep 1907), 49, No. 10, 853. In his book, Ronald Ross stated “These verses were written in India between the years 1891 and 1899, as a means of relief after the daily labors of a long, scientific research.”

To our senses, the elements are fourand have ever been, and will ever befor they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception,the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Fourof Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the World.To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratoryand hunt them down.But the four we have always with us, they are our world.Or rather, they have us with them.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,but there is also a third thing, that makes it waterand nobody knows what it is.The atom locks up two energiesbut it is a third thing present which makes it an atom.

Who, of men, can tellThat flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swellTo melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail, The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,If human souls did never kiss and greet?

[First use of the term science fiction:] We hope it will not be long before we may have other works of Science-Fiction [like Richard Henry Horne's The Poor Artist], as we believe such books likely to fulfil a good purpose, and create an interest, where, unhappily, science alone might fail.[Thomas] Campbell says, that 'Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.' Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of life.

[The Book of Genesis is] [p]rofoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful; in the latter it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful.'

Samuel Butler, Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1917), 229. Note: “Wardour Street prose” implies the use of near-obsolete words for effect, and derives from former times when the street was known for its many antique shops.

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- Carl Sagan